Systematic Analysis of Risks in Cloud Architecture

There has been a significant increase in the adoption of cloud services for business and personal use in recent years. Although cloud computing offers significant advantages with respect to cost, however it puts the business organizations at risk. For example, cloud users have often little or no knowledge of the cloud service providers' infrastructure. This lack of insight and control if not dealt with before cloud adoption may lead to unanticipated significant financial losses to the business. Moreover, Service Level Agreements (SLAs) are usually non-negotiable and biased, which transfers all the responsibilities and monetary losses towards the client. Although a lot of work has been done to address the security and privacy related issues in the cloud and some of the risks related to the cloud have also been identified yet there is absence of any research that has analyzed the risks related to cloud adoption by looking at the SLAs of different cloud service providers and their whitepapers. Our paper is directed at systematically analyzing the risks in cloud architecture plus looking at the effects of those risks in case they become reality.